Audiovisual integration of emotional signals from others' social interactions

Audiovisual perception of emotions has been typically examined using displays of a solitary character (e.g., the face-voice and/or body-sound of one actor). However, in real life humans often face more complex multisensory social situations, involving more than one person. Here we ask if the audiovisual facilitation in emotion recognition previously found in simpler social situations extends to more complex and ecological situations. Stimuli consisting of the biological motion and voice of two interacting agents were used in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with visual, auditory, auditory filtered/noisy, and audiovisual congruent and incongruent clips. We asked participants to judge whether the two agents were interacting happily or angrily. In Experiment 2, another group of participants repeated the same task, as in Experiment 1, while trying to ignore either the visual or the auditory information. The findings from both experiments indicate that when the reliability of the auditory cue was decreased participants weighted more the visual cue in their emotional judgments. This in turn translated in increased emotion recognition accuracy for the multisensory condition. Our findings thus point to a common mechanism of multisensory integration of emotional signals irrespective of social stimulus complexity

Complexity of Multivariate Integral Equations

The problem of full solution of Fredholm integral equations of the second kind with data from Sobolev spaces with dominating mixed derivative is studied. Existing estimates for the univariate case are extended to arbitrary dimension

Incentives for nature conservation in urban landscapes

The aim of this article is to contribute to the development of ecological-economic incentives in conservation policy. Our approach uses strategies for establishing habitat networks as an example to develop spatially-oriented incentives in urban landscapes. The incentives should ideally consider aspects both of ecological effectiveness and economic efficiency. Our understanding of ecological-economic incentives reaches beyond this stage: not only must economic incentives in environmental policy be based on ecological knowledge, but also, they have to consider social aspects of implementation and acceptance. The ecological analysis of strategies for species protection in urban landscapes leads to management recommendations as a basis for the specification of environmental policy goals. Based on ecological knowledge, which shows where to invest scarce resources, the economic perspective aims at analysing and evaluating environmental policy instruments for their suitability and efficiency. The ecological and economic research is to be combined with a sociological approach, which investigates the choice and application of environmental policy measures as a system of social action. The analysis of problems of implementation and acceptance will be used to support the introduction of new instruments or to improve existing incentive systems related to nature conservation in urban landscapes. For this purpose, a survey was carried out on the use of environmental policy instruments (regulation, planning, economic incentives, communication, information) in German cities in 1997. Furthermore, two existing economic instruments in German nature protection policy are analysed in detail: the compensation charge as part of the impact regulation and incentive programmes on the level of the German federal states that offer financial incentive measures for nature protection. --

Pitfalls and potential of institutional change: Rain-index insurance and the sustainability of rangeland management

Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevail in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the sustainability of rangeland management. We show that a rain-index insurance with frequent payos, i.e. a high strike level, leads to the choice of less sustainable grazing management than without insurance available. However, a rain-index insurance with a low to medium strike level enhances the farmer's well-being while not impairing the sustainability of rangeland management.ecological-economic modeling, weather-index insurance, Namibia, grazing management, risk, sustainability, weather-based derivatives

Managing land use and land cover change in the biodiversity context with regard to efficiency, equality and ecological effectiveness

The introduction of conservation-friendly farming measures is an important tool for biodiversity conservation. Recently, a debate has started whether this money is spent effectively, i.e. whether it successfully contributes to conserve biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. Several types of criticism have been raised that are adequately responded by environmental policies leading to spatially and temporally heterogeneous habitats. However existing policies for species conservation are still designed to support one conservation measure only by paying an equal amount of compensation to all land-users carrying out the corresponding measure. Regarding ecological findings we firstly point out in which cases environmental policies have to be differentiated in space and time. Secondly, we analyse the necessary and sufficient conditions for transfer schemes to exist that are able to introduce a spatio-temporally heterogeneous land use and land cover type. Thirdly, we reveal that strategic considerations of land-owners limit efficiency and fairness considerations of the policy makers when determining the ecologically accurate payment scheme. However ' surprisingly ' if policy makers seek to minimise their budget required for implementing the desired policy goal, this at the same time guarantees that the individual profits of the land-owners (when performing with the desired policy goal) are as equal as feasible. --

Integrating econimic costs into the analysis of flexible conservation management strategies

Flexible conservation management, where measures are selected in each decision period and depending on the current state of the ecological system, are generally perceived as superior to fixed management, where the same measure is applied in each decision period independent of the current state of the system. In past comparisons of fixed and flexible conservation strategies the additional costs that arise only in flexible strategies have usually been ignored. In this paper we present a framework to integrate these 'costs of flexible management' into the evaluation of flexible conservation strategies. Using the example of an endangered butterfly species we demonstrate that the costs of flexible management may reverse the rank order of flexible and fixed conservation strategies, such that fixed strategies may lead to better ecological results than flexible ones for the same financial budget. --conservation,ecological-economic model,extinction,flexible management

An agglomeration payment for cost-effective biodiversity conservation in spatially structured landscapes

Compensation schemes in which land owners receive payments for voluntarily managing their land in a biodiversity-enhancing manner have become one of the most important instruments for biodiversity conservation worldwide. One key challenge when designing such schemes is to account for the spatial arrangement of habitats bearing in mind that for given total habitat area connected habitats are ecologically more valuable than isolated habitats. To integrate the spatial dimension in compensation schemes and based on the idea of an agglomeration bonus we consider a scheme in which land-owners only receive payments if managed patches are arranged in a specific spatial configuration. We compare the cost-effectiveness of agglomeration payments with spatially homogeneous payments on a conceptual level and for a real world case and find that efficiency gains of agglomeration payments are positive or zero but never negative. In the real world case, agglomeration payments lead to cost-savings of up to 70% compared to spatially homogeneous payments. --agglomeration bonus,biodiversity conservation,cost-effectiveness,ecologicaleconomic modelling,metapopulation,spatial heterogeneity

Computing Discrepancies Related to Spaces of Smooth Periodic Functions

A notion of discrepancy is introduced, which represents the integration error on spaces of $r$-smooth periodic functions. It generalizes the diaphony and constitutes a periodic counterpart to the classical $L_2$-discrepancy as weil as $r$-smooth versions of it introduced recently by Paskov [Pas93]. Based on previous work [FH96], we develop an efficient algorithm for computing periodic discrepancies for quadrature formulas possessing certain tensor product structures, in particular, for Smolyak quadrature rules (also called sparse grid methods). Furthermore, fast algorithms of computing periodic discrepancies for lattice rules can easily be derived from well-known properties of lattices. On this basis we carry out numerical comparisons of discrepancies between Smolyak and lattice rules